1. Drink the wines you enjoy with the foods you enjoy. If you have a thirst for Riesling and a hunger for steak, So be it. You will note be zapped by lightning for putting the two together. And in truth the flavors that your palate prefers will probably go together just fine.
2. Experiment. You might make some ghastly choices. But you will stimulate your own thinking about food flavors, as different wines accent different flavors in a dish. And you may, perhaps by dumb luck, hit upon some wonderful marriage of food and wine that will win you acclaim in your kitchen.
3. Do you want to show off the food, or the wine? This is especially an issue when you're entertaining. If you are preparing a tricky and special dish that you hope your guests will ooh and aah over, don't distract them with an expensive 20yr old wine. Hungry people eating and drinking can concentrate on only so much at a time. Serve a good wine that will complement the meal but will not be too assertive.
Likewise, if you are dusting off a fine old bottle or have invested a small fortune in the hottest new wine, make sure you get the hoped for reaction by preparing simple food that will provide a tasty background for the wine.
4. The 4th involves a choice: you can match for similarity or for contrast. For example, if you are serving fish with a rich, buttery sauce, you might want to pick a Chardonnay or white Burgundy that has very buttery characteristics, as many do. In other words, you find food and wine with similar flavors (not always an easy task). But sometimes you may use wine as a counterbalance, to cut through or set off aggressive flavors in a dish. A good example here are oily types of fish, which often do best with tart, crisp white wines like a Pouilly Fume or Italian Chardonnay, both of which refresh the palate. This principle also gives you a wonderful out when, in your experimenting, you make a real blooper. As your guests grimaces over a nasty battle between food and wine you can observe to them that you hope that the contrast between food and wine flavors has worked out to their satisfaction.
5. Match strength to strength. If you're serving a delicate cod dish, don't attack it with a full-flavored California Chardonnay. If you're serving a rich, spicy, tomatoey pasta dish, don't let it overwhelm a pale red Burgundy. Light flavors deserve light wine; heavy flavors or spicy ones, need heavy wine.
6. The next principle will slightly complicate your task- the secret is the sauce. In many cases you want to match a wine not to the main ingredient in a dish but to the sauce. Why do you use a sauce? Because it changes the flavors of the food you're preparing. Salmon with creamy dill sauce is rather different from Salmon with lobster sauce- a wine that is good with one might not complement the other. So consider the balance of sweetness and tartness, the creaminess, the herbs in the sauce when thinking of a wine.
7. The next principle is one of my favorite. It involves the one bit of chemistry that makes wine and food significant. It is the acid in wine that makes it tastes tart (or sour), but acid is the backbone of any wine, and the best food wines are nearly always those with healthy acid levels. The hazard of trying to evaluate a wine without food is that a wine tastes overly tart by itself, but will be delightfully refreshing and stimulating with a meal. Likewise, a wine low in acid (often called "soft") that tastes lush and flavorful by itself may simply have its flavors disappear when served with food. All the other flavors in wine "hang" on the acid-so consider the acid of a wine when matching with food. Just because a wine is sweet doesn't mean it is low in acid. German Rieslings are usually slightly sweet, but they have good balancing acid-more in fact, than many other white wines. This makes them, despite what you've heard, actually rather good food wines, particularly with rich foods.
8. Let the last principle be... tradition. American food and wine lovers have devoted a decade or so to the serious business of matching food and wine, and in typically American fashion, have come up with a variety of technically sophisticated and well-organized approaches. Meanwhile, Europeans have for the better part of two millennium been happily sating their appetites with local wines made to suit the local cuisine-and have so mastered this art that they needn't think about it. So the marvelous sweet beef of Burgundy matches beautifully with Pinot Noir, while the fat fowls, freshwater crayfish and delicate cheeses of the region make one crave, Chardonnay. The rich, spicy dishes of Germany suit Riesling just fine, thank you very much, while Italian Chianti does very nicely with the Prosciutto, minestrone and grilled meats and game of the Tuscan hills. The easiest way to deal with the vexing question of matching wine to food is simply to follow the lead of our forebears. It's difficult to go wrong serving a lovely Italian wine with an Italian dinner. (And yes there is such a thing as Spaghetti wine). When serving seafood, look for wines made by those close enough to the sea to smell it.
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